The Private World of Patti Smith

In her acclaimed memoir, 'Just Kids', Patti Smith chronicled her emergence as one of music's most daring performers. But her new book, M Train, reveals another side of the rock icon—Smith the writer, traveler, wife, mother, daughter, and searcher. Here, she talks to Joan Juliet Buck about finding happiness, grappling with loss, and why, at the height of her pop stardom, she gave it all up for love.

The title of Patti Smith's new book is M Train: "Mind train, a train of thought that can lead anywhere," she says. The events in it are shaped by the kind of poetic logic that only touches those open to the mysteries of chance. In it, Smith makes many pilgrimages—to French Guiana, Japan, Mexico, England, Iceland, Morocco, France—each specifically to tie up a loose end, be it in fiction or in life. Each journey, even the one to the corner deli in Greenwich Village to buy a small regular coffee, opens up a magical portal. She's a wanderer, a widow, and an exceptionally singular artist-poet-singer-photographer, and her precise descriptions of everyday life allow the reader to become her.

Smith herself became world famous in the mid-1970s with the release of her landmark album, Horses. By the end of the decade, she'd left it all behind to marry musician Fred "Sonic" Smith of the band MC5 and move to Detroit, where they raised their two children, daughter Jesse and son Jackson. Since her return to New York after her husband's death in 1994, her work has unfolded in rich layers, with new masterpieces—the song "Constantine's Dream" on her most recent album Banga among them. Just Kids, her memoir about her early years with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, won a National Book Award in 2010, and is in the process of being adapted into a miniseries for Showtime; M Train comes near to accomplishing Marcel Proust's goal to follow the workings of the human mind and the human heart. "It's not so easy writing about nothing," declares a cowpoke whom Smith sees in a dream on the first page; by the end of the book you know that nothing is everything and that life is a labor of love.

Steven Sebring

I was intimidated by Patti Smith: singer, poet, rock star. I know nothing about music. I hosted a party for her in New York a few years ago, but I wasn't there; afterward I heard that she liked finding a book about the geography of Iceland on a shelf at my apartment. So I bought a baguette, she came to my place for a roaming conversation free of any agenda, and I got to meet the person I'd been wanting to talk to all my life.

JOAN JULIET BUCK: After reading M Train, I feel like I know you.

PATTI SMITH: The book is really how I am. I have many vocations, one being in the realm of rock 'n' roll. But I've always considered myself a writer, and M Train is really about my writer's life. I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life—this is my actual real life.

JJB: M Train begins with this dream of a cowpoke. Who is he?

PS: One could say it's oneself talking to oneself. Or Sam Shepard. Because I've known Sam since I was 24—like 45 years. Sam and I talk about books all the time. Some of these conversations with the cowpoke cross into conversations I've had with Sam. The cowpoke is sort of a voice of conscience.

JJB: The book is written from a consciousness where even inanimate objects have feelings: You apologize to bedspreads. This relationship with inanimate objects—have you always had it?

PS: Always. Maybe a lot of that was from the books I read as a child, like Hans Christian Andersen and Raggedy Ann, and all these stories where toys come to life. My siblings were a bit younger than me, and I was always entertaining them and making up stories. It delighted me to think that any of the dolls or bears that we played with had a life of their own. To me, it wasn't that more far-fetched than accepting the idea of God and angels.

"I never really wanted to be a singer—not with any longevity. But I always wanted to be a writer."

JJB: Were you given that, God and angels?

PS: My father wasn't religious—my father was searching. My mother was a Jehovah's Witness, but she didn't practice when she was young because she couldn't give up smoking. But she believed in it, and later quit smoking and became a full-fledged Jehovah's Witness. I was raised Jehovah's Witness. I was in Bible school at five or six years old, but I wouldn't say that we were a religious family. We were a very open family, where all of these things had a place of wonder. I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.

JJB: I had those talks. I used to make huge promises.

PS: Oh, me too. I was going to be perfect. I was going to be good. I was never going to steal. I was so young that I actually kept track of the few indiscretions. But by the time I was 10 or 11, I was completely demoralized. I thought, "I'm done. I'm never going to be a missionary," because my indiscretion column, whether it was little lies or stealing a Chunky bar, kept me from sainthood.

Smith with her mother, Beverly, in New York, 1977

Caroline Coon/Camera Press/Redux

JJB: You write a lot about the idea of loss. There's a section in M Train where you've traveled to Sylvia Plath's grave to photograph it, but then the photos vanish. "Nothing can be truly replicated," you write. "Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line."

PS: I'll never know what happened to the photographs. But I was so involved in my mission, and all this complicated travel to get there, and so enamored of the photographs I took, that I completely forgot to do what one is supposed to do when you visit someone's resting place, which is at least say a little prayer or think about them. Really, it's unlike me, but it was like I took spoils. I was more concerned with my spoils than any kind of humanistic reason for being at a person's grave site. But in the end, I was actually glad that it happened, because it forced me to go back a second and a third time, and by the third time I was so humbled that I was only really there for her.

JJB: How much of your mission is bringing the inanimate and the dead to life?

PS: My mission—if I think of a mission other than anything altruistic—is just to do good work. These other things I do every day, so I don't think of them as missions. My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice. My mother lost her mother when she was 11, and my mother talked to her mother. It wasn't anything weird or strange. I learned certain things like that from her. My father also lost his mother. I never met either of my grandmothers, but I knew them from my parents.

JJB: You write about 'Ino, the café on Bedford Street that I loved as much as you did. It's where I discovered poached eggs with truffle oil.

PS: All I ever got at 'Ino was brown bread with olive oil and Tuscan white bean soup.

JJB: When did you start dipping your bread in olive oil?

PS: When I was reading Paul Bowles in the late '60s, because that's what they did in his books. I'm from South Jersey: The idea of eating a roll with olive oil and anchovies or some kind of sardine and drinking mint tea definitely comes from reading Paul Bowles. A lot of my behavior comes out of books. I've always thought of myself as sort of a bum—a redefined bum. Obviously, I'm not homeless. I'm not an old alcoholic. I'm not jumping trains. I just like to live in a certain way.

With husband Fred

Ron Galella, Ltd/WireImage

JJB: And now you have a little house in Rockaway [Queens] …

PS: It's finally finished. I have this little yard, which is a meadow. My friend Klaus [Biesenbach] and I are neighbors there, and he is such a beautiful gardener. While I was away on tour, he threw grass seed down, wildflowers, and there were big sunflowers in my yard. I love my little overgrown yard. And my house is wonderful. It's everything that I need.

JJB: You write a great deal about how much you love TV detective series and how the characters become your friends.

PS: I'm most addicted to the BBC detective shows. Kenneth Branagh's Wallander is superb. He's done all this powerful work in Shakespeare, but his Wallander is his crowning achievement. I also love David Tennant in Broadchurch. I've had fictional relationships since I was a child, because I was often sick and always in my sickbed. When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend. At this point in my life, it's not a boyfriend I'm looking for. I just like living in certain atmospheres. Or I just like people as they are. Like Detective Linden in The Killing. I loved her sense of purpose. I liked Holder, but he's also really cute … I even got to work with them, which was amazing.

JJB: How?

PS: When they canceled The Killing, I wrote several fan letters to Veena Sud, the producer. Then she got to do six more episodes on Netflix, so she asked me if I wanted to come out to Vancouver and watch them shoot. I had finished my book, so I said, "Of course I'll come." Then she sent me another message: "Well, if you're coming all the way to Vancouver, why don't we give you a little cameo?" I was asked to play a neurosurgeon. So I went to Vancouver and did my little scene with Linden and Holder, my favorite detectives. I had, like, nine lines or something. That's the beauty: I never suspected when I fell in love with this show that I would ever meet these people, let alone interact with them.

JJB: Tell me about meeting the pope.

PS: Pope Francis. I wrote a very long piece for my last album called "Constantine's Dream." It crisscrossed the life of St. Francis and Piero della Francesca. I do enormous studies to do one little 12-minute song, so I went to Assisi, and the monks took me way up high inside the basilica where they were restoring some of the Giottos. I had to wear a hard hat. They were working on the sky, and they gave me a brush and some paint and said, "Please." I said, "I can't touch Giotto's painting." They said, "It's watercolor." I said, "I'm so sorry, Giotto. It's not my fault …" I had lunch with the monks of Assisi afterward, and I said, "You know, what we really need is for a pope to take the name of Francis, because anyone who took the name of Francis would have to live up to it." They went on and on, saying, "This can never happen. There's never going to be a pope named Francis because Francis was a Franciscan." I said, "Well, we can dream." So then Pope Benedict stepped down, and there was going to be a new pope. My daughter, Jesse, and I happened to be together when they showed the white smoke on TV to announce who the new pope was, so we sat down to watch it. I was saying, "Francis, Francis …" It was like rooting for a horse at the Kentucky Derby. Well, then the guy comes out and says that the new pope is named Francis … We were jumping up and down.

Meeting Pope Francis at the Vatican, 2013

Osservatore Romano/Reuters/Corbis

JJB: They later invited you to sing at the Vatican.

PS: They have Christmas concerts and asked me to sing in Rome two years in a row. He's a very humanistic pope. Very smart too. I got to meet him briefly. I had old rosaries that I was able to have blessed for two women—devout, infirm Catholics, both in their 80s, who would never get to see the pope. That was my mission, to give them as much of my visit as I could. They were trying to arrange for me to speak with him more privately, but I didn't want to because I didn't have anything to tell him except to say thank you, which I'd already done. And he's a very busy man.

JJB: The woman I see in your writing is so aware of everything around her. The way you describe Robert [Mapplethorpe] in Just Kids and show the way he relates the things around him is so vivid.

PS: I wanted people to know him—his humanity, but also his devotion to his work. Robert instigated Just Kids. He asked me the day before he died to write our story. He loved me to tell it to him over and over when he was tired or we had no money or we were hungry or if he had a disappointment. It was like comfort food: "Tell me our story …" I knew exactly what he wanted. It just took me a really long time to do it. It was painful; I didn't know how to go about it. But in writing M Train, I just wrote. I had no idea where I was going. It's really more how I like to be—in life, in everything.

JJB: What do you take on the road?

PS: I always wear the same thing onstage. I take two pairs of black pants or dungarees, 10 pairs of bee socks, some underwear, five or six T-shirts, and a black jacket. When Ann Demeulemeester heard that I had to do a Horses tour this year, she actually had seven black jackets and seven vests that are exactly the same made for me because she'd retired. That's all I need.

JJB: Bee socks?

PS: I always wear them. They're Japanese. Cotton lisle. A little pricey. When people say, "What should we get Patti for Christmas or her birthday?" I say, "Get me a pair of bee socks."

JJB: You also write in M Train about a Comme des Garçons coat you love …

PS: My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. My mother would get the Sears catalogue or Redbook, but there was a woman in our neighborhood who bought Bazaars and Vogues, and at the end of the year she would get rid of them. I found the magazines, and I was just entranced. These were the years when Irving Penn took all the pictures of his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives—those great pictures of her in those three-cornered hats. Now, my mother was a waitress and my father worked in a factory. But I fell in love with this world. We got a lot of our clothes from the big Goodwill in Camden, New Jersey, and they got all of their clothes from people in Philadelphia who knew how to dress—the people in the Grace Kelly areas. I picked out everything I wanted by how it felt. I didn't care how it fit me—if I felt something silk I wanted it. Cashmere, Irish tweed. The labels were also beautiful. Balenciaga had big ones. I really had the most interesting clothes, raw silk black Capris and Dior silk shirts. They were all ill-fitting, but I didn't care.

JJB: You didn't get drawn into the fashion world?

PS: I'm not suited for it. I just loved the clothes. I loved photography.

JJB: But you knew from a very young age that you wanted to make art, no matter what it was.

PS: I fell in love with art the first time I saw it in person at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. First of all, it was exquisite. But I also saw myself in it. I was tall, gangly, skinny, with long dark hair. I didn't like makeup. Then I would see a John Singer Sargent picture of a girl in a white dress and straggly hair, or Modigliani's nudes that were so skinny, or Sienese primitives, the Madonnas, and I identified with their body language. I was attracted to whatever it is in people that creates art, but I also felt an identification with it, which is important when you're young, to feel connected.

JJB: When you were with Robert, you were drawing, acting, writing—being creative in every direction.

PS: Robert worried about that. He would always say, "Patti, you're spreading yourself too thin. Can't you just choose one?" But I couldn't help it. I could draw all night, then write a poem. I had such exuberance and such energy that I wound up becoming a performer, which I'd really never daydreamed about. I never really wanted to be a singer—not with any longevity. But I always wanted to be a writer. Performing was completely off my radar. It was really Robert who pushed me to perform my poetry. Then I found, in doing that and subsequent readings and singing a little bit, that I had no stage fright.

With Robert Mapplethorpe in New York, 1969

Norman Seeff

JJB: You are claustrophobic, though.

PS: I hate to be enclosed. I don't like bathroom doors—I don't shut them. In fact, in my house in Rockaway, I have no doors. They wound up putting a sliding door where the bathroom is, in deference to visitors. But it's just one space. That's how I'm happiest, seeing what I'm looking at.

JJB: You didn't perform for years after you moved to Detroit.

PS: Sixteen years. My last job was in Florence, Italy, in September of 1979. We had 80,000 people in a soccer arena. At that point I could see the whole thing and where it was going … It was a very good time for me to shift my path. It was exciting being sort of a rock-'n'-roll star in Europe, but I noticed something else that had changed. My behavior had become different—I'd become a high-strung, demanding version of myself. I'd never had people drive me around, and then all of a sudden, if a car didn't come, I'd say, "Where's my car?" Or I'd just find myself being mean, sometimes by necessity. I wasn't taking drugs or drinking. I was working and working and working. But I wasn't writing anything.

JJB: Because you had too many commitments?

PS: Too much stress. Too much travel. I was pulled in too many directions. My public life was so demanding that I wasn't doing the things that I deemed the most important. I wasn't writing, I wasn't drawing, and personality-wise, I was just completely arrogant. I'm not trying to be overly apologetic for my behavior—I wasn't evil. The lifestyle I had was one that lent itself to becoming more and more self-involved. You get spoiled. So it was actually a good thing that I stopped at that point because it forced me to take stock of myself. I had fallen in love. I had found the person I wanted to be with. Being on the road took me away from him, and it was time to make the choice. I was in my early 30s, and if I wanted a life with Fred, then I needed to change my life. He lived in Michigan. He was a Detroit guy.

JJB: How did you know Fred was it?

PS: I knew the first minute I met him. I don't know why; I just did. It wasn't even a path that I imagined myself on. I didn't really want to leave New York City. I hadn't thought about having a family. But he's the person I fell in love with. And it was all a good thing. In those 16 years, I got to know him so deeply. We had two children that I just love so much. I evolved quite a bit in every way, just comprehending the daily struggles of human beings. I'd felt immune to those kinds of things because I was an artist—I was not going to have to immerse myself in those kinds of domestic problems. Then I became the person who was the caregiver, who cooked the food and scrubbed the floor and hemmed the uniforms. I learned through doing what people's lives are like, what my mother's task was. So it made me appreciate my mother more.

JJB: Through reality …

PS: In a way that was no less poetic than anything else. I opened my mind and saw beauty and nobility in simple things, simple tasks. Some people imagine that it was a tremendous sacrifice, but no—I had my children and a life with Fred. I also developed a writing discipline in those years. I'd never had one before. I'd been an artist—"I only write at night," or "I have to smoke a little pot," or "I have to have the right little desk." And then those things changed. All of a sudden I had to find my time for writing within my very demanding domestic world. So I started waking up at five o'clock in the morning, when the kids were still asleep, and writing until they woke up for school at eight. I did that all through the '80s, every single day—I have stacks and stacks of unpublished writing. That's when I learned to be a writer. Just Kids didn't come out of flotsam and jetsam. It came from years of developing a discipline.

JJB: Now you're turning it into a miniseries for Showtime.

PS: Immediately after I wrote Just Kids, I was approached by a lot of people to make a film out of it, and I didn't really want to do that. It had taken me so long to write—off and on, 10 years. The last thing I wanted to do was to be involved in another configuration of it. But in this period of my life, I'm on the road a lot and I watch a lot of television. I decided that this particular book would probably fare better as a little miniseries that would allow the characters to breathe. I also thought, If you do something for Showtime and you do a good job, then you have the potential for a lot of people to be watching it simultaneously. That idea of community appeals to me. I think Robert would've liked that too.

In Stockholm with son Jackson and daughter Jesse, 2011

IBL/Rex USA

JJB: What do you read when you're not writing a book?

PS: I play a game where I pretend that I won a contest, and I get to open up the catalogue to a random page and pick a book. I can't tell you how entertaining that is. It's an old game that I used to do when I had no money. I'd have a moment of pretending that I opened up the catalogue to the $60,000 first edition of Moby-Dick, and it was mine. Now I have some money to buy a rare book or two …

JJB: I have too many books.

PS: I gave away 20 boxes, but it didn't make a dent. It's terrible. I'll have a whole library to write one song. Sometimes there's a jewel, a bit in one book and a bit in another .… It's like an unfolding screen of the four seasons. You say, "If I get rid of that, then there's no more autumn." I remember when my mother was my age. She'd collected a lot of stuff she bought in thrift stores, at flea markets. Then one day I came to visit her, and the house looked very empty. I said, "Mommy, where are your dolls? Where are the plates?" She'd packed them away. I said, "Are you all right? You're not sick …" She said, "No, I'm keeping the things I like the best. You get to a certain time in your life where you don't want to be fettered by all of your things. You want to have some lightness." Now I understand. This year I put everything into my little house in Rockaway, and now I want to keep my life as unfettered as possible. So maybe I'll just pretend to get rare books from my catalogue, and not really get them.

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